Google announced that it was going to release the
numbers at its annual shareholders meeting a few weeks
ago. "Many companies in (Silicon Valley) have been reluctant
to divulge that data, including Google, and, quite frankly, we
are wrong about that," David Drummond, who oversees Google's
public policies, said at the time.

In a blog post that accompanies the numbers, Laszlo Block,
Google’s senior vice president for people
operations, writes: